This disclosure relates generally to distributed computing systems, and more particularly to techniques for dynamic load balancing on distributed computing systems using a landscape reorganization algorithm.
If an information processing application is distributed over multiple hosts, a standard system administration goal is to balance the workload among all the available hosts. A balanced load is such that all the hosts have a roughly equal usage of CPU and memory resources. To achieve such an equal resource usage, a reorganization mechanism can be used to move workload from one host to another during normal operations, that is, in real time or dynamically.
The application must be suited for a reorganization mechanism in the following respects: the application must handle multiple objects that can be separated from each other; the objects should not be difficult to move, which implies for example that they should not be locked for a long periods of time; and it should be possible to split the objects into smaller objects.
A stateless application, in which session-specific information about the state of the system is not carried over from one session to another, is well suited for such dynamic reorganization. For example, the SAP NetWeaver information search and retrieval service TREX is well suited for such dynamic reorganization because searching is stateless.